The Man Who Understood Democracy

February 1, 2022
A wide-ranging study of the life and thought of the French aristocrat who, looking in from the outside, taught Americans about the political system that guided them. When he was just 25, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) traveled across the Atlantic to see the American experiment for himself. He landed in 1831, a time of turmoil, and made some compelling observations from the start--e.g., Americans were fractious, worshipped flags, exalted themselves as exceptional. As he traveled across the country, his observations deepened, and he formulated a maxim that he would later apply to France in a time of turmoil: "One must first belong to one's country before one belongs to a party." He determined that a durable democracy must involve every citizen, but he found troubling signs on every front. In Cincinnati, for instance, he observed the segregation of Blacks and the fact that the city's "whiteness was by design," while in the South, he noticed that there were few White people who did not carry a concealed weapon, adding an interlocutor's note that "in the North you have religion; here you have fanaticism." As Zunz, who has written extensively on his subject, shows throughout, Tocqueville recorded plenty of signs of disunion and fragmentation in a country divided by the institution of slavery; nor was he blind to the mistreatment of Native Americans. When Tocqueville returned to France, Zunz notes, he wrote with particular appreciation of the fact that seemingly irreconcilable systems of government--federal, state, and local--somehow managed to work and that the branches of the federal government were restrained from tyranny by the deliberate insertion of checks and balances. Even so, at the end of his life, having written extensively in the same British library room where Karl Marx (whom he never met) was working, Tocqueville was pessimistic, fearing that "the democratic experiment might be failing." Those who worry about clear and present dangers to democracy will find much grist in this astute biography.

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February 21, 2022
University of Virginia historian Zunz (Philanthropy in America) delivers a richly detailed intellectual biography of French political philosopher and statesman Alexis de Tocqueville. Born into an aristocratic family in 1805, it was democracy—especially following his youthful trip to America—that became the ruling passion of Tocqueville’s life, argues Zunz. He chronicles Tocqueville’s early years, “dull and uninspiring legal training,” and career as a prosecutor before he received a commission to study America’s penal system. Mapping Tocqueville’s American travels from 1831 to 1832, Zunz documents meetings with luminaries including John Quincy Adams and Sam Houston, as well as unnamed prison inmates, Native Americans, African Americans, and an “anticlimactic” visit with President Andrew Jackson. Out of the trip came Tocqueville’s best-known work, Democracy in America, which became influential for explaining America to Americans. Though Tocqueville “expressed doubts about the ability of American democracy to contain economic conflicts between the North and the South,” Zunz writes, his “main message” was that democracy was “resilient.” Zunz also delves into Tocqueville’s subsequent political career and writings on the French Revolution; documents his friendship with abolitionist senator Charles Sumner; and refutes modern historians who have questioned his commitment to democratic ideals. Wide-ranging and meticulously argued, this is a noteworthy contribution to Tocqueville studies.